Re: [math-fun] record computation of Pi ,
<< Digits. Feh. What a waste of chips and neurons. Sure seems that way to me. If anyone can please explain what the big deal is, I'm listening. —Dan
From: Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> Sent: Dec 11, 2016 9:04 AM
Digits. Feh. What a waste of chips and neurons. The only excuse: Now that they've done it, converting to the continued fraction might be slightly easier than extracting the cf directly. But if you want both, it might be easier to extract the decimal from the cf. Or maybe not, since they probably wrote their own multiprecision routines to use base 10^19 vs 2^64 to dodge the big radix conversion cost. Or is floating point still so much faster than fixed that they sacrificed several digits per "word" to redundant exponents, like the old Mersenne finders? --rwg
Date: 2016-12-10 17:53 From: Simon Plouffe <simon.plouffe@gmail.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Reply-To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com>
They made a new computation record of Pi,
http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/records.html
22 459 157 718 361 digits.
This is big.
the digits seems to be rather normal in base 10 and 16.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1612/1612.00489.pdf
also : 22.459157718361 is Pi^E.
Some explanations here : http://pi2e.ch/
best regards, Simon Plouffe _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
I'll guess that it's a PR decision to use decimal, something the general public can understand. Perhaps some of these pi calculators could be persuaded to weigh in with their own explanation for the choice of decimal over continued fraction. -- Gene From: Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2016 10:50 AM Subject: Re: [math-fun] record computation of Pi , << Digits. Feh. What a waste of chips and neurons. Sure seems that way to me. If anyone can please explain what the big deal is, I'm listening. —Dan
From: Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> Sent: Dec 11, 2016 9:04 AM
Digits. Feh. What a waste of chips and neurons. The only excuse: Now that they've done it, converting to the continued fraction might be slightly easier than extracting the cf directly. But if you want both, it might be easier to extract the decimal from the cf. Or maybe not, since they probably wrote their own multiprecision routines to use base 10^19 vs 2^64 to dodge the big radix conversion cost. Or is floating point still so much faster than fixed that they sacrificed several digits per "word" to redundant exponents, like the old Mersenne finders? --rwg
Date: 2016-12-10 17:53 From: Simon Plouffe <simon.plouffe@gmail.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Reply-To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com>
They made a new computation record of Pi,
http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/records.html
22 459 157 718 361 digits.
This is big.
the digits seems to be rather normal in base 10 and 16.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1612/1612.00489.pdf
also : 22.459157718361 is Pi^E.
Some explanations here : http://pi2e.ch/
best regards, Simon Plouffe
Shouldn't this be a "teachable moment", which provides the mathematics community an opportunity to gently inform the press & public about *continued fractions* (hint -- they're not about distillation towers or chaotic insurgents) ? I always felt let down by my (otherwise excellent) high school math education for not teaching me anything about continued fractions. At 11:07 AM 12/11/2016, Eugene Salamin via math-fun wrote:
I'll guess that it's a PR decision to use decimal, something the general public can understand. Perhaps some of these pi calculators could be persuaded to weigh in with their own explanation for the choice of decimal over continued fraction.
participants (3)
-
Dan Asimov -
Eugene Salamin -
Henry Baker